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Hagan buried Coyne’s death as a payback?”
    “Please, good sir. Be serious. After all this time, Hagan is going to risk hurling his promotion to chief into the toilet to do another favor for an old partner whose life he already saved once?”
    “If that’s the way it happened, no.”
    Peete started waving toward the bartender, and I got up to leave before he had another. Bottle, not drink, that is.

Walking past the receptionist, I said, “Arbuckle is expecting me.”
    Down the corridor and back inside the city room, I was struck again by the din. If Jane Rust did have a confidential source, Coyne or anybody else, I couldn’t see her trying to talk by telephone over the noise in the air.
    Holding a sheaf of papers and a red Flair pen, Arbuckle came out a door, mumbling to himself. Through the opening and to his rear, I could see a conference table and six or eight people rising around it. I was moving toward Arbuckle when she appeared behind him and looked at me full flush.
    “Beth!” The word was out of my mouth before I could think better of it.
    The woman smiled. The hair and the eyes were identical, but the neck was too long, the teeth too big....
    She said, “Close but no cigar, friend. It’s Liz, Liz Rendall. Do I know you?”
    “No. You just remind me of someone. Sorry.”
    Arbuckle said, “Liz, moonstruck here is the private eye from Boston . He gets today, no more, then he’s gone. Got it?”
    Instead of acknowledging him, Rendall said to me, “Had lunch yet?”
    “No.”
    “Come on.” She put the papers she was carrying on a desk near Peete’s and threw a sweater around her shoulders, shawl-style.

    “Don’t ask me why they call it the Village Inn , since there’s no place for sleeping over and Nasharbor hasn’t been a village since before the Civil War, but the menu will remind you of Mom’s own cooking.” The place had plate-glass windows, Formica tables, and vinyl booths. There was a soda fountain on one side and Andy Williams coming over the tinny stereo system. I ordered Today’s Special: a cup of soup, grilled tomato and cheese sandwich, and an iced tea. I decided not to commit to the Indian pudding just yet. Aside from Liz Rendall and me, the only person in the place under sixty was our waitress.
    “Why so many senior citizens?”
    Rendall sipped her water. “Because the owner here offers them a special two o’clock to five o’clock discount. And because fifty cents off means they can ride the transit bus down and back and have a meal out for the price of the meal alone.” She looked around the restaurant. “A lot of these people are close to the line. I like to frequent a place that gives them a break.” She took another sip and asked her question through the glass. “So who do I remind you of?”
    I thought about passing it off, but instead said, “My wife.”
    She glanced down at my hands. “A guy like you should wear a ring.”
    “My wife died.”
    She set down the glass. “Oh. Oh, I’m sorry.”
    “I am, too. For leading you into it like that. It wasn’t intentional.”
    Rendall looked at me a little more closely. “No. No, I don’t think it was. Intentional, I mean. I can see why Jane must have trusted you.”
    “Did she trust you?”
    “About her source, you mean?”
    “Yes.”
    “Not exactly. She told me about having one, sort of seeking my advice about what to do. But she didn’t tell me his name until after... after he was dead.”
    “Jane implied to me that she’d revealed Coyne to more than one person. If you weren’t one of them, who might have been?”
    She grew thoughtful. “Hard to say. You just met Jane that once?”
    “Yes.”
    “I don’t know how she struck you, but I interviewed her when she applied here. On first impression she seemed serious, diligent, willing to dredge up the mundane stuff that keeps a paper from printing mistakes.”
    “What about on second impression?”
    “Well, after you got to know her, or better, tried to